


Thirty-Two Degrees

by mosylu



Series: How It Should Have Ended [5]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Barry did not get the whole story, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-09 00:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6880882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barry can't believe what Caitlin did. To Cisco of all people.</p>
<p>Maybe she never was the person he thought she was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thirty-Two Degrees

**Author's Note:**

> This is the other side of [Homesick](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6855661), because some people have asked what happened and why Caitlin was trapped beyond the breaches without the boys. You could read them in either order.

The hospital smelled like hospitals always smelled - institutional, sort of bleachy - and sounded like they sounded - phones ringing, voices murmuring, machines beeping in the distance.

Barry sat with his head in one hand. The other hand was clamped tight around Iris’s. He felt like her touch was the only thing that tethered him to earth. Without it, he might just float away and dissolve. Not the tearing pain of the speed force ripping him to shreds, but the dreamy nothingness of a body that simply didn’t want to be here anymore. Didn’t want to be anywhere.

Zoom was dead, he kept telling himself. Zoom was dead, and that was good. That was about the only good thing to come out of this day.

He looked up to check the doors that led from the waiting room to the ICU.

Cisco was beyond those doors.

And Caitlin was …

He shut his eyes and told himself not to think about Caitlin anymore. Not ever again.

She wasn’t Caitlin anymore, anyway. She couldn’t possibly be.

_But Zoom was dead._

He looked around. Dante and Mrs. Ramon were huddled together, Dante’s arm looped around his mother’s hunched shoulders. She had her head bowed over the rosary knotted through her fingers, her mouth moving as her eyes stared blankly at the linoleum.

He wondered if she knew all the things her overlooked second son had done for Central City, for the world, for all the worlds.

For a split second, he was back there in the insane asylum on Earth-2, weaving his way around over a hundred breaches that had spontaneously opened up when Cisco had cut Zoom off from the Speed Force. They’d been like ragged curtains in the air, swirling and fluttering with glimpses of his own world at every step.

The battle raged around him and he had his hands full trying not to trip in between worlds as he dodged and punched Zoom’s metahumans, battling to find his friends, battling to find Zoom.

He’d found Cisco on the floor, and Caitlin hunched over him, hands pressed flat against his chest. “Caitlin!” he cried.

She’d looked up with glowing blue eyes, and he had to swallow a scream. Then he’d noticed the blue tinge to Cisco’s lips, and the stillness of his chest, and everything he ever knew about one of his best friends shattered around him.

He shoved her - he wasn’t proud of that, even now. She’d gone flying, landing a foot away. She’d sprawled there, watching coldly as he hunched over Cisco, pressing his fingers to his friend’s cold skin, searching frantically for a heartbeat that wasn’t there.

“What did you do?” he screamed at her. _“What did you do?”_

She opened her mouth, and then he remembered the defibrillator in his suit, and slapped his hands onto Cisco’s ( _cold, cold, cold_ ) chest. Lightning crackled and Cisco’s body spasmed for a split second. Barry checked again and found the heartbeat, slow, almost syrupy, but there. He let out a gasp of relief.

She reached out, mist spilling off her hand, and Barry slapped it away. “Stay away,” he snarled through his teeth. “You stay away.”

He hauled Cisco into his arms - he flopped like a rag doll - and looked around for the nearest breach. Once he burst into his own world, he reached the nearest hospital in less than a minute. “Hypothermia,” he’d gasped as nurses jumped up in shock. “H-his heart stopped - it’s back now but - but he’s so c-cold - ”

“All right, we’ve got him, okay - _damn_ , he’s cold, somebody get a core temp right now - how long was his heart stopped?”

“I don’t know,” Barry had said. “I’m sorry. His name is Cisco Ramon, his emergency contacts are in his phone. I’m sorry. I have to go.” He’d bolted out of the hospital, back toward the the breaches, the battle -

Where he’d found Zoom with an icicle through his chest, and the metahuman army fleeing, and Caitlin gone.

He’d stared down the blank-eyed shell of his enemy, trying to make sense of it.

Why would Killer Frost kill Zoom? For revenge? To take his position as the head of the metahuman army?

Why would Caitlin become Killer Frost in the first place?

But he’d seen her, hunched like a feeding scavenger over Cisco’s body. _Cisco_ of all people. She wasn’t Caitlin. Maybe it was the darkness, maybe it was being with Zoom all that time, maybe she’d just never been the person he thought she was, but -

“Flash!” Wally had yelled. “Flash, the breaches!”

They were closing around them, healing up. Only his speed propelled him through the very last one as it shrank into nothingness.

Back on their earth, they’d taken stock. Everyone was here. Everyone except Cisco and Caitlin. A babble of panic rose, a quest for one last breach that maybe wasn’t gone yet -

“Leave her there,” Barry said in a hard voice.

“What? Why?”

He’d told them.

Now they sat in the waiting room, waiting to find out if they’d lost another friend today.

The doors thumped slightly as someone came through. Barry jolted upright.

“Cisco Ramon?” the doctor called out in a slightly accented voice.

They all leapt to their feet and crowded around the plump, greying South Asian woman. If she was startled to see such a melange, she didn't show it. “I’m Dr. Melissa Megwhar and I’m treating Cisco,” she said. “His heart is beating normally again.”

Gasps of relief, a whispered “Gracias a Dios” from Mrs. Ramon.

“Can we see him?” Dante asked.

“I’m afraid not. He’s still unconscious and we’re still working on him intensively.”

Joe stirred. “But you said - ”

“I said his heart was beating, and so it is. The real worry with cardiac arrest is the possibility of neurological aftereffects. That’s what we’re trying to ward off.”

“You mean brain damage,” Barry said numbly. What would that be like? Would he even be Cisco anymore?

“Yes. A brain that goes without fresh oxygen for more than three to five minutes will almost certainly suffer cellular death. Any possibility that any of you know how long his heart was stopped?”

“No,” Barry said hollowly. “The Flash didn’t know.”

Her eyes rested on him, as if they saw more than he was strictly comfortable with. Iris put her arm around his waist.

“Well,” Dr. Megwhar said. “There’s bruising and a slightly cracked rib, indicative of chest compressions performed, and a mild burn on his clothing that looks like it came from an electrical shock similar to a defibrillator. So the Flash certainly knew what he was doing. But honestly, the most promising thing is the hypothermia.”

Barry’s head shot up. “The cold _stopped_ his heart.”

She gave him a narrow-eyed look. “I can assure you it did not, Mr - ?”

“Allen,” he said. “Barry Allen. I’m one of - I’m his best friend. What do you mean it didn’t stop his heart? What did?”

“We’ll have to do more research to determine how and why a healthy young man suffered apparently spontaneous cardiac arrest, but the hypothermia was a very mild case. His core temperature was thirty-two point five degrees - ”

“That’s freezing!” Barry burst out. “That’s _frozen_!”

“Celsius,” she said through her teeth, clearly fed up with men interrupting her who knew nothing about medicine. “Or about ninety degrees Fahrenheit.”

Joe, who’d had first aid, said, “That’s not so bad, really.”

“No, it’s not. Hypothermia doesn’t even begin to affect the heart until the core temperature drops to twenty-eight, and cardiac activity wouldn’t stop entirely unless it fell all the way to twenty.” She shot Barry a look. “Eighty-two and about seventy, in Fahrenheit.”

Under his arm, Iris twitched. “Barry,” she whispered.

_No,_ he told himself. All this meant was he’d stopped her in time.

“Okay,” Joe said. “But what do you mean, it’s promising? Far as I can tell, it just means you need to warm him up.”

But she shook her head. “Oh, we won’t warm him up for at several hours at least. Brain damage occurs in these cases because the brain is demanding huge amounts of oxygen that the body simply can’t provide without a strongly beating heart to push the blood through the veins. Not to mention some other chemical reactions within the body as a result of the cardiac arrest itself."

This was the way Caitlin would have explained it, Barry thought, and had to clamp his teeth together.

"Hypothermia puts the brakes on the metabolism and acts to reduce these demands, slowing the rate of damage. Therapeutic hypothermia is precisely what EMTs would have administered if they’d found your friend instead of the Flash. And they would have lowered his temperature to about that point, as well. He was really very lucky it happened like that.”

Barry’s ears rang. He shut his eyes, picturing the scene again. Caitlin’s arms braced on Cisco’s chest - he’d interpreted it as Killer Frost drawing all his heat out of him, but -

CPR. He hadn’t done CPR. It must have been her.

And the mild - _mild!_ \- hypothermia, when Earth-2’s Killer Frost had frozen a man solid in under ten seconds.

Mrs. Ramon said, “Does this mean he’s going to be okay?”

She hesitated. “Therapeutic hypothermia isn’t a magic bullet. It will slow damage, but it won’t completely prevent it. But the human brain is a marvelously plastic organ, more so than we used to think.” She spread her hands. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

“How long until he wakes up?”

“Hard to say, this early, and with this little information. It could be hours - it could be days - it could be weeks.”

_It could be never_ hung in the air, unsaid.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Dante said, holding out his hand.

She shook it, then Cisco’s mom’s hand, Joe’s and even Iris’s. She told them that if he didn’t wake up within an hour or so, they would be better off going home and waiting for the hospital to call. Barry jolted to attention and said, “Thank you,” through numb lips. She nodded at all of them and turned to go back to Cisco’s bedside.

Dante and Mrs. Ramon immediately pulled out their phones and started making calls in a mixture of Spanish and English. She was crying, her mascara running, and his voice trembled as he talked to whatever relative he’d reached.

The Star Labs team pulled away to a corner, giving both groups a little privacy.

“Barry!” Iris hissed, clutching his hands.

“I know,” he said. “Oh, God. I made such a terrible mistake.”

Joe put his hand on the back of Barry’s neck. “Hey. You didn’t know. It was a rough scene, you miss details - ”

“But Caitlin. Why in any multiverse would Caitlin hurt Cisco? Why would she betray us like that?” Barry pressed his fingers into his eyes, feeling tears burn under his fingertips. “Why would I even think that?”

“Can we open a breach?” Iris said. “Go get her? Bring her home?”

“Maybe. We’ve done it mechanically a couple of times. But Cisco’s the only one who’s ever managed a breach that went where we wanted it and when we wanted it, without a side effect of total chaos.” And Cisco might never wake up. Or he might wake up and not be Cisco anymore.

Iris seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “Brain damage,” she said quietly. “What if brain damage affects his powers?”

“Okay,” Joe said firmly. “Okay, you two. I know you’re thinking of worst-case scenarios right now, but it’s early days yet. They’re gonna work on him. We’ll wait and see. If we have to, we’ll call on your pal Ollie, borrow some of that clout and that fortune, bring in specialists.” He pulled out his phone. “I gotta make some calls. You guys should think about going home - ”

“No,” they both said at once.

He eyed them, then nodded and stepped away.

Barry stood for a moment holding Iris. He wished Cisco was awake, and fine, not just for Cisco’s sake, but also so there might be some possibility that Barry could send a message across universes -

_I’m sorry. I’m so sorry._

FINIS


End file.
